Red Hat enlists another 65 names in war on VMware

Red Hat has rolled out an updated version of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, an infrastructure platform that provides an application messaging service, a kernel that dovetails with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to improve the speed of low-latency applications, and a scheduler designed specifically for distributed workloads and so-called "cloud computing".

With MRG 2.0, unveiled on Thursday, Red Hat claims higher performance and better scaling, and it has beefed up the platform's management console. It also runs in tandem with RHEL 6.1, the latest version of the open source outfit's enterprise OS.

With new drivers for 10Gigabit iWarp Ethernet, Red Hat says, the platform's AMQP-based messaging service can provide double of the performance, and it claims the platform's scheduler can now handle over 100 jobs a second.

On Thursday, the company also announced it is now offering courses on how to build your own "private cloud" infrastructure, meaning an in-house version of the sort of readily scalable infrastructure the likes of Amazon and Rackspace provide on the open interwebs. The course covers the use of everything from RHEL and JBoss to Red Hat Virtualization and MRG. The company also intends to offer a separate course on Red Hat CloudForms, the company's consolidated infrastructure-as-service-platform.

Earlier in the day, the Red Hat-led Open Virtualization Alliance announced that in the four weeks since its launch, it has signed up an additional 65 members. Designed to accelerate the adoption of Red Hat's open source KVM hypervisor, the alliance already includes such big names as IBM, HP, and Intel, and now it has added scads of second tier outfits. Speaking with The Register on Wednesday at the cloud-happy GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco, cloud computing vp Scott Crenshaw told us the company "can't process applications fast enough."

The alliance is essentially an effort to push against VMware, whose closed sourced hypervisor currently dominates the market. ®